Thursday, February 14, 2013

Dialog's dilemma!

Dialog is facing a major issue these days and that is the lack of capacity. There are many subscribers who want several channels but Dialog is unable to deliver. Recently we carried out a poll on our FB page regarding the introduction of "Comedy  Central" over "Sony beTV", even though "Sony beTV" came out on top as the most popular of the two channels, however the clear winner was the opinion that "both the channels are useless & Dialog should have gone for a better channel".

Dialog's problem is that when they give preference to one channel over another, they alienate a certain cross section of their subscriber base. Dialog you are not running a democracy, you are running a pay television company and anybody should be able to watch any channel of their choosing, provided it's available legally in the region of course.

There are people who want "Sirasa TV" and some who want "Comedy Central" and others who want "Sony beTV", then there are those who want "SET Asia", there are channels like "Big CBS Prime", etc that telecast reality shows like "Survivor" on par with the US broadcast and they telecast shows not normally telecast by channels like Star World India/Zee Cafe India. Not to mention there are people who want to able to watch God TV 24 hours a day and EWTN 24 hours a day. Nobody likes to be told by the pay television that they pay for the services rendered, that a channel that is available 24X7 can be watched only during certain hours of the day because they are unable to cater to the subscribers needs.

Dialog TV has a long way to go and cannot call themselves "The Future Today" since "the future" is not giving what they can, "the present" in pay television business is to telecast many channels and let the subscribers decide what he/she wants to watch. Dialog cannot provide "the present" so its a shame to talk about "the future".

Dialog has no choice but to increase transponder capacity. Recently Dialog TV tried to increase the number of channels in the HD pack and failed miserably when the quality of existing HD channels dropped, causing Dialog to remove some of the test channels. This only means that even the new transponder that carries a few HD channels plus a few non HD channels is now full to capacity.

Leasing new transponders costs money - lots of it - so Dialog should concentrate on moving to MPEG4 DVB2, which maybe expensive in the short run but as we have pointed out countless times, it has the potential of doubling or tripling the number of channels on the platform and increasing the subscriber base exponentially. With a move like this Dialog could add all the local channels, stop time sharing and assign each channel individual slots and add more channels.

Dialog is living dangerously, remember that the satellite has only a finite number of transponders and sooner or later they will run out of transponders and this would leave Dialog TV in the doldrums.

In addition we find it baffling that Dialog still wastes a slot called "Dialog Test" and has made no attempt to add a channel to that slot so far and its been over a year or two since that slot was vacated. All of this points to only one thing, Dialog is totally unprepared and it only takes a pay television company with a limited knowledge of the business to put Dialog TV out of business since it seems that those in charge of Dialog TV don't seem to be having even a "limited knowledge" of the business.

Please keep us updated on the latest on Dialog TV as the days progress.

10 comments:

Priyantha De Silva said...

In vain we are paying nearly 1000 rupees for month, nearly 12 000 rupees for a year for these limited HD channels. Now it's time to bring something more. My Dialog TV bill is creating on 16th every month, before next 16th of this month, means today I'll go to the Dialog Care to fill a form to cancel the HD connection. Now it's boring specially with Star Movies HD India showing same movies again and again.

Unknown said...

100% agree with this Statement

Davi said...

Ok I've had it too with DialogTV, what's the best Indian D2H HD connection I could get and from where ???

don said...

Where is SIRASA ???????????????? or mbc channels. any information?

SankaSoft Audio Video Productions said...

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leyland said...

It seems there is some light at the end of the tunnel...
http://www.lbo.lk/fullstory.php?nid=311275689

nilu said...

@leyland

good news for dtv customers but when they gonna do that... we don't know..

Keyweez said...

There was an SMS that came yesterday stating that they will be upgrading all the STBs of the Gold Package customers to the new PVR enabled STB free-of-charge. May be dialog wants to start with the highest paying ones in getting them ready for the MPEG4 S2 change, as the current HD enabled customers already has the same STB.

Nokia said...

Dialog Television continued its growth momentum recording YoY revenue growth of 27% to reach Rs 3.0Bn for FY 2012. DTV EBITDA was recorded at Rs 636Mn for FY 2012, an improvement of 11% YoY on the back of strong revenue growth.

NPAT however decreased by 57% YoY to be recorded at Rs 11Mn for FY 2012 due to the recording of an exceptional impairment charge arising from the ongoing upgrade of the company’s digital satellite broadcasting network from MPEG2 to MPEG4 and High Definition (HD) technologies.
The transition to a full MPEG4 configuration will enable DTV to increase the return on investment on Satellite Transponder resources going forward in tandem with enhancing the quality of service to consumers. DTV’s Pay Tv Subscriber base increased by 23% YoY to be recorded at 264,000 as at the end of FY 2012.

TV & Radio Sri Lanka said...

Please continue commenting under the latest post titled "Full MPEG4 upgrade in the wings".

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